


the music of the spheres

by Ralph_E_Silvering



Series: Skywalker [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order (Video Game), Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Ahch-To, Angst and Romance, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Dyad (Star Wars), Force Visions, Gen, Ghosts, Jedi, Jedi lineage feels, New Jedi Order, Obi-Wan's house, POV Rey, Poe makes a brief appearance, Post-TRoS, Redeemed Ben Solo, References to Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008), Rey & Rose friendship, Scavenger Rey (Star Wars), Tatooine, Zeffo, cal kestis and cere junda mentions, jedi quest, scholar Ben, star-crossed lovers, the world between worlds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:27:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22456456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ralph_E_Silvering/pseuds/Ralph_E_Silvering
Summary: Rey is haunted by Ben Solo's ghost, and although her friends are afraid he’ll never leave her alone, Rey is more afraid that one day he will.To find the answers she seeks, she'll have to track down the long-lost Jedi, Ahsoka Tano, who was once apprentice to both the legendary Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi and the infamous Darth Vader.
Relationships: R2-D2 & Rey (Star Wars), Rey & Ahsoka Tano, Rey & Rose Tico, Rey/Ben Solo
Series: Skywalker [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1667044
Comments: 8
Kudos: 43





	1. Tatooine

**Author's Note:**

> Post-TROS. Half of Rey is caught between life and death, lost in the world between worlds with Ben. But Rey is a scavenger from Jakku as well as being a Jedi, and she holds onto what is hers. Ben Solo, who was once Kylo Ren, is hers. 
> 
> Because the story isn't over.

Tatooine

***

She felt him, everywhere and always.

Nothing felt over, nothing felt finished, nothing felt right now that he was gone.

Sometimes he was there, just out of the corner of her eye as she worked on the _Falcon_ , or talked with Poe, or joked with Finn. Sometimes she turned away in the middle of a conversation or started awake from a deep sleep because she was sure she’d heard his voice calling her.

Sometimes she felt fingers in her hair or gently touching her neck or reassuringly placed at the small of her back when she needed it most.

Sometimes, while meditating, she tried to reach out and take his hand.

After Leia died, and Ben died, and Palpatine was finally defeated, Finn took to watching her with worried eyes and Poe loudly talked about evil that would not leave while he held strategy meetings with the leadership who were re-founding the Republic. Leia had left guidelines and had had long discussions with former Republic and Imperial senators, scholars, historians, and renowned thinkers before she’d died. They had a guide to go on, but there was still so much work to be done and debated over.

This Republic would not fall as easily as the last. The evil that had consumed it and tried to utterly destroy it, had been eradicated.

_By the Skywalkers_ , Rey heard people whispering, as they looked over at her in awe. _By the Jedi. By Princess Leia of Alderaan._

_By her son, too_ , Rey always made sure to tell them. Without Ben, none of this would have been possible.

But even if Palpatine and the Sith were gone, there were battles to fight and planets to free and people to help stand against evil and oppression and tyranny.

So they were busy and Rey didn’t want to worry them. Besides, she was a Jedi, the last Jedi, and she had her own path to walk.

Of all her friends, only Rose seemed to understand. The other woman had a sensitivity to the Force that had nothing to do with being Force sensitive, like Finn and even Jannah turned out to be, but rather had to do with a heart overflowing with compassion and a mind that tried to reach out to others and really looked at the world around her.

“First Sight,” Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi’s journal called it. “Seeing what is really there.”

After Rey decided to stay on Tatooine, she read the exiled Jedi Master’s journal more and more as the days passed. It had been given to Luke Skywalker by Kenobi himself, after Skywalker returned to Tatooine to the old Jedi’s hut in order to complete his training in the last days of the old war.

The famed Jedi Master and General who had lived through the fall of the Jedi Order and the Republic, and watched his dearest friend, the man he was Force bonded to, fall into evil, had a dry sense of humor, a wry way of looking at all that happened and finding some sort of peace in it, that Rey adored and wished she had for herself.

There were still too many nights when she would wake up angry and afraid, biting her lip hard enough to draw blood, just so as to keep from screaming.

No matter how many people were around her in the Resistance, she still felt so alone.

“Go,” Rose told her one day, several weeks into Ajon Kloss’ rainy season. “Just go.” Rey had heard a small boy crying in the night and gone to look for him, disturbing the entire base before she realized that no one else could hear him except her.

The Force echoed with the child’s cries even now; he was alone and desperately afraid.

_I’m here_ , Rey tried to call out to him, but as always there was a wall between her and him, and she could not reach him. _I’m here_ , she called again anyway.

She knew it was Ben, somewhere in time, somewhere from the past.

The Oracle on Mustafar had told Ben that they were a Force dyad, bound by the Force itself in a way the universe hadn’t seen in thousands of years. They were connected across space and time.

Rey had seen Ben in a dream, in a nightmare, long before she’d ever met him on Takodana. She’d known him, somewhere deep in her bones. And he’d known her. And when they’d touched, she’d felt - - connected for the first time.

And now there was this hole in her chest, in her soul, screaming in her blood, that she couldn’t get rid of no matter how much she fought, or trained, or meditated, or began to teach Finn what the Force really was and how to reach it.

“Just go,” Rose said again, her eyes probably seeing more than Rey wanted her to. “You know what you have to do…and you can’t do it here,” she finished sadly.

And it was so like what Ben always said to her, what the Jedi always said: Trust yourself.

Rey smiled, a small smile, but a smile, nonetheless. She reached out and clasped Rose’s hands in gratitude, turning her head away for a moment as she caught a glimpse of Ben out of the corner of her eye, dressed in Alderaanian formal robes of state. He was a child still, a solemn one with wide, dark eyes that looked ancient in his pale face.

His eyes turned and met hers and Rey dropped Rose’s hands, breath catching in her throat. She took a step towards him, hand reaching out. “Ben,” she breathed. _Please_ , she wanted to beg.

But the child vanished, leaving Rey alone.

Rose touched her shoulder and Rey jumped. The other woman looked from Rey towards where the child had been. “Where will you go?” she asked, not mentioning Rey’s vision. “What did you find in the books from Master Skywalker?”

Rey took a deep breath and tried to center herself, but her heart was pounding frantically, and she could still feel the echo of Ben’s presence in the Force. He had been so brilliantly bright as a child, like a beacon in the Force.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. She’d thought about Acho-To again, it was part of the chained vergence sometimes known as the World between Worlds after all. Exogol, where Ben had died, was a part of it as well, and sometimes she thought…

“I don’t know,” she said again, hands clenching and unclenching. Ever since she left Jakku she’d had a purpose – one she’d run away from at first – but the Force had been leading her somewhere. And now, it felt like the Force had abandoned her.

Rose was still there, a steady presence by her side. “They’re having a funeral for the General on New Alderaan in a fortnight,” she said, voice soft. “And – and for…Ben,” she said, voice hesitant over his name. None of the others called him anything by Kylo Ren. When they spoke of him at all. “Perhaps you’ll find peace there.”

Rey nodded and Rose left, leaving her with just Artoo for company. The blue and white astromech beeped softly but made no other sound. He understood her more than anyone in this moment, for his family was gone as well.

Rey didn’t have the heart to tell the others that she didn’t want to find peace and she didn’t want Kylo Ren to leave her alone. She wanted Ben to haunt her in any form, always. She wanted to reach back and touch him.

She wanted him here, with her, or she wanted to be there, with him, wherever he was.

***

New Alderaan was a beautiful jewel of a world, located far out in the outer rim past Tatooine. A planet of swirling white clouds, deep-blue oceans and snow-capped mountains, Leia Organa had chosen the world for its resemblance to the one the Alderaanians had lost. With most of the remaining money left to her by her father and mother, she’d purchased it from a member of the Elder Houses and made it a safe haven for her people.

Alderaan had rebuilt and no matter the atrocities committed by the First Order, they had never turned their attention there besides a minimal orbital blockade. Now the streets of New Aldera teemed with silent, pale-faced people, come to say good-bye to the princess who had never left them and her son, who had been lost so long to darkness.

Rey watched the procession move through the elegantly laid out streets, watch children throw pale white snowflowers before the empty carriages that didn’t carry any bodies but had holograms of Princess Leia Organa and Prince Ben Solo Organa.

She watched the tears on the Alderaanians’ faces and felt their genuine grief in the Force, a reflection of her own.

The sky was brilliantly blue today, crisp and cold and clear, in the middle of New Aldera’s winter. The silver buildings that blended into the environment around them sparkled in the sunlight, and everyone was dressed in whites and pale blues and lavenders.

Rey had been given a place of honor, a Skywalker in all but name, the Jedi apprentice of their princess – the chosen one of their prince.

“They took our children, a whole generation of our youth tortured and tormented into corruption and darkness. And Ben Solo of Houses Antilles and Organa was no different. For his Skywalker blood, the former Emperor targeted our prince, the last of Alderaan’s royal family, Queen Breha’s grandson.”

The woman giving the speech, her blonde hair shading to grey, swallowed tightly and tried to keep her voice even. “But the prince was his mother’s son.” She swallowed again. “He was his mother’s son and he fought the darkness. He fought it every day of his life, even against insurmountable odds.”

Her voice wavered and she firmed it. “And in the end, he won.”

***

That night Rey twisted and turned restlessly in the simple, yet richly appointed rooms the Alderaanian royal staff had given her. From outside the palace, a melancholic wind instrument played a slow, sad tune. Muted glowlights turned on in the hallways when someone went quietly passed.

Rey sighed and rolled onto her back again with a sigh. She didn’t sleep well anymore, and the funeral had been hard to bear without crying. She’d raised her chin and clenched her fists together and tried to look like a Jedi, like Leia’s heir, but the beautiful ceremony really brought it home that her Master and general wasn’t coming back.

And Ben’s…

She opened her eyes and watched silver moonlight play around the room, highlight the clean, elegant lines of the architecture, the silver and white and pale blues and purples of the curtains and bedspread and furniture and wall hangings. Everything was lovely – a simple, refined sort of beauty that at once showed the status of this place, as well as a nobility that wasn’t shown through a senseless display of wealth.

Seeing this place, she understood Leia and Ben better. They were royals who led from the front, who never even mentioned their royal status, but whose noble birth was written in every line of their being.

Princess Leia had never accepted the title of queen, she’d never been coronated from New Aldera’s palace. She’d appointed a Viceroy, Evaan Verlaine, in her stead and served Alderaan’s people from the New Republic senate.

Rey was unsure of her reasons for doing this – respect for her mother, the last queen, acknowledgement that Alderaan was no more and that New Alderaan would be different, or even a feeling of guilt, survivor’s guilt, and grief.

But she wondered how Ben had felt: a prince without a throne, a Skywalker whose family never told him their dark secret – both the hope of an entire galaxy and the target of every person who wanted revenge of his family.

The pressure would have been enormous, and the loneliness would have been a nearly unendurable burden.

And, well, the Force had never abandoned him and had thwarted Palpatine’s plans and joined him with her in the Force – their memories and abilities and training and power all one. And together they had fulfilled their destiny.

The mournful song ended and there were a few seconds of silence before another, sweeter, heartbreakingly sad, began.

Rey sighed quietly and threw back the covers.

Pulling on her outer, silk tabard – Alderaanian white with a hood to honor both her Master and the Jedi and her own heritage – she hesitated a minute before buckling on Leia’s lightsaber, an elegant, white-gold instrument, and escaped out into the royal gardens.

It was warmer here, the forest enclosed within the palace’s grounds and untouched by snow.

Rey stepped softly between towering trees and over murmuring brooks, the moonlight turning everything violet and silver and deep blue, with the trunks and leaves of trees black as night. She walked and she ran her hands across rough bark, and she felt the life in this place.

The Force was new and untouched here, beautiful and pure, but it held very few echoes of those she loved.

Rey did not know how long she walked among the enchanted forest, but eventually she came to a river, rippling gently downstream. Beams of moonlight illuminated a path between the trees on the other side, the riverbank sloping upwards, its groundcover of elder and ivy and clover waving in a gentle breeze.

And there, at the top of the small slope, back against a tree and lost in a book, was a boy – a young man with midnight colored hair. His shirt was white and the glow from the moonlight turned his skin to ivory. He bit full, plump lips as he turned a page, frowning in concentrating.

“Ben,” she whispered, awed and hoping her hair wasn’t a mess.

Her whisper had been as light as hair, but he must have heard her for his head jerked up and their eyes met, dark eyes locking and holding.

He was younger than she remembered but not a child. He smiled tremulously, as though she were a dream or a vision.

“Hello,” he said, voice echoing strangely, but the Force burned between them, hot and bright like a live wire.

There was darkness eating at him already, a sickness siphoning off the brightness of his Force presence, and it made Rey sick with anger to know what Palpatine and Snoke had done to him. But she swallowed it back, knowing her anger would do no good here and now.

Instead she walked to the edge of the river and just looked at him, taking in everything she could. The Force was singing, more powerful than she’d ever heard it before, a heartbeat in her ears, the life around her echoing a melody she’d known all her life.

Ben closed his book, placing it gently on the ground beside him. He slowly stood, his tall, lanky form unfolding from the ground in a slightly ungainly fashion, as though he hadn’t entirely grown into his body yet.

His hair was soft and full about his face, and he was dressed only in a gauzy white shirt, black leggings and tall, knee high black boots. She could feel his slight unease and uncertainty in the Force, but underneath that she could feel the curiosity in him.

That same curiosity he’d had on Acho-To when they’d connected for the first time. She’d been so full of righteous fury, ready to hurt him and close the door, but he – supposedly the Dark Side’s creature – had been curious, interested, awed

She had been so sure of what was the right course of action, but he – _Ben_ had always looked around him and really thought about things, wondered…. even hoped. She could hear it in his voice, read it in his memories, glimpse it in his future.

She had never dared to hope. Growing up on Jakku didn’t leave much room for sentiment or even dreams. But she had dreamed of him.

And she’d learned to hope after touching his hand on Acho-To, the Force bringing them together from over half a galaxy away.

He walked to the other side of the river, standing across from her with the moonlit water between them, an impossible divide. “Who are you?” he asked. _I know you;_ he didn’t have to say.

She wondered how long she’d haunted his dreams and nightmares, like he’d haunted hers.

She closed her eyes, throat tight. “Don’t be afraid,” she told him, like he’d told her. _Bound through space and time_ , Ben had said about them. “I feel it too.”

The Force flowed around her and through her. _Yes_ , it said.

Rey took a step out, foot landing on top of the water, and where once she might have sunk into its cold, icy depths, now the water held her.

She heard Ben’s quick intake of breath and her eyes snapped back up to meet his, saw the awe there, and she took another step.

He held out a hand to her and Rey walked across the water to him.

Rey stepped onto dry land again, directly before him. He was breathing as hard as she was, his chest heaving, and his lips parted as he stared at her.

“It’s you,” he said, his beloved voice echoing from the Force. His hand was raised towards hers, ghostly palm held up and out to her.

Rey smiled. “It’s me,” she promised, raising her own hand to his, palm to palm and fingers entwining together.

Ben smiled; just as he did on Exegol after they kissed. After he saved her – the sweetest, most beautiful smile she’d ever seen.

Her heart was pounding, and she drank in his features, moonlight casting him half in shadow, half in light. His eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled, and he looked so very young.

His fingers curled around hers and Rey tried to hold on, begging the Force to not take him from her this time, but she couldn’t the seconds anyway.

He began to slowly fade from her sight, and Rey tried desperately keep hold of him, feeling useless tears prickling at the corner of her eyes. “Wait for me!” she cried out to him, but she didn’t know if he heard.

And then he was gone, the forest echoing with her cry, the universe echoing hollowly where Ben should have been.

***

Tatooine was different: a rough, dirty, desert planet in the middle of nowhere.

In some ways Rey felt more at home here than in any place since Jakku, and in other ways this place felt completely alien.

It was similar to how she felt about Ben’s loss.

At times the pain was relentless, constant, like the ache of a missing limb and the resultant bitter yearning to be like she used to be; to know that he was out there somewhere, waiting for her, hunting her, dreaming of her – even if that knowledge was mixed equal parts dread and relief.

At other times she could almost forget him, become lost in the numbness and malaise which seemed to be her natural state now the Sith were destroyed, her purpose completed.

Then it would hit her like a psychic punch straight to her gut – a pain so deep and searing and raw that all she could do was drop to her knees, wrap her arms around her body, and wait for the wave to pass.

It was cruel, the worst type of punishment she could imagine. For how could she live without half of her soul?

It was Maz Kanata, the Force-sensitive space pirate queen, who gave her the old wooden trunk she’d kept in her palace with its treasure from the Skywalker family, and R2-D2, their faithful companion and friend for three generations, who showed her where Obi-Wan Kenobi had lived during his time on Tatooine.

Rey buried Luke’s and Leia’s lightsabers in the desert, where they couldn’t be used by anyone, either good or bad – where they could rest – forever.

She left Chewie, BB-8, the porgs and the Falcon back at the Lars Homestead as well. From there they could aid Finn, Poe, Rose and the burgeoning Republic as needed, while she and Artoo took their own path and journeyed into the Jundland Wastes towards the long-abandoned hovel of the famed General Kenobi.

Leia and Master Skywalker both adored General Kenobi; Rey new this. For all Luke’s bitterness towards him on Ach-To, she’d understood that that was his own personal sense of failure talking, not a true reflection of his first Jedi teacher. And Leia always spoke of him, had a holo of him in her quarters on Ajon Kloss, and named one of the Resistance’s Mon Cala cruisers after him. There was even a battle maneuver called the Kenobi Twist – misdirection involving a smaller ship hiding in the ion exhaust of another.

She also knew that Artoo had loved Master Kenobi as well. The little astromech had lost Obi-Wan and Anakin and even Padme Amidala, the Skywalkers’ mother. He’d lost the twins. And now he’d lost Ben.

She never really asked him about Ben – about what Ben had been like as a child. She didn’t think she had the strength to bear the stories he would tell her. Going through the trunk was difficult enough.

Rey remembered the ancient wooden box from when she’d first found Anakin’s lightsaber in there on Takodana. It had been her first experience truly touching the Force, and Obi-Wan Kenobi spoke to her then, told her that she was taking her first steps.

He had reached out to guide her like he had Anakin and Ahsoka Tano and Luke, his presence tied to Anakin’s lightsaber. She didn’t know much about psychokinesis – Leia had said it was a rare talent but one which Ben had been very strong in – but she knew that Anakin Skywalker must have loved Obi-Wan Kenobi very much, and vice versus, for the echo of his presence to be tied so strong to the Skywalker lightsaber.

Touching it had been scary at first, opening her up to an entirely new world. Touching it had led her to Ben. Or him to her.

After she found Kenobi’s house, scaling a cliff face with Artoo hovering in the Force beside her, and checked it for squatters and dangerous animals, she sat in a patch of sunshine in the old Jedi’s front room and opened the box.

Artoo stood beside her and twittered mournfully. “Beep beep, beeeeep.”

“I know,” Rey told him sadly, holding up each priceless memento for the little droid to see.

A string of beads – Jedi apprentice beads – which Artoo told her once belonged to Ahsoka Tano, Anakin’s padawan during the Clone Wars.

A grainy hologram picture of two men and a Togrutan girl, all with Jedi robes and big grins on their faces. The one in the center, with the scar and the wavy hair was definitely Ben’s grandfather. Two men with identical faces waved from either side of the group of Jedi; one in blue armor with Mandalorian jaig eyes on his helmet and the other in yellow. “Rex and Cody,” she whispered.

A clone soldier from the 501st, long held in hibernation, had made his way to General Organa on Baatu last year to offer his services to Anakin Skywalker’s daughter. “General,” the man had said, saluting smartly and eyes roaming over Leia’s face like she was the last light in the darkness. “The name’s Jesse. I served under your father during the Clone Wars.”

He’d told the best stories about Obi-Wan and Anakin, about the Jedi, that any of them had ever heard. Poe and Finn were enraptured by everything he told them about the last days of the Republic, and Jesse and Artoo would tag team the stories they told the young Force sensitive children the Resistance was rescuing from the First Order.

“The Jedi _will_ come back,” Jesse told them all, and eyes would swing to Rey with uncomfortable hope and awe.

Rey had never seen Leia laugh like she had at the story where Hondo Ohnaka, the famed pirate, had captured Dooku, Kenobi and Skywalker and they’d all tried to escape while tied together.

A delicate hair comb all in jades and blues from the former queen, Padmé Amidala.

Luke’s Jedi robes.

An old earthenware pot that felt warm and steady in the Force, like the sea rising and falling.

An Alderaanian signet ring with the crest of House Organa on it.

And a calligraphy set, parchment filled with row upon row of beautiful handwriting, next to an ancient Jedi compass which she just knew had been Ben’s.

The pain of loss hit her again, so strongly that she almost missed the book buried right at the bottom of the chest. A journal. She reached out and brushed a hand over its smooth, synthleather surface –

And felt her stomach drop out from beneath her, a tug on her bellybutton from the Force…

_And remember, the Force will be with you always._

_I believe he is a vergence in the Force…...A vergence, you say?......He is the chosen one…..._

_You were the Chosen One. It was said you would bring balance to the Force…..._

_Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you are my only hope……Then he is our last hope……._

_You were named for Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. For General Kenobi. He saved your mother’s life. And mine. Even your fathers. …….. I’m not good like him. I wish they hadn’t named me after him. …… He would have loved you Ben. If you listen, maybe one day you’ll hear him speaking to you too……_

Rey pulled back with a gasp, falling back from the chest as Artoo squeal in alarm.

“I’m alright,” she said breathlessly, heart pounding from the influx of overwhelming sensation. Her sudden movement dislodged Ahsoka Tano’s beads from their looping around a nail at the top of the box. They fell down onto Rey’s hand and Obi-Wan’s journal with a wooden clatter, both cool after the dry, arid desert, and warm to the touch, like the hand of a friend.

Rey drew them out and shut the box firmly closed. There were tears on her face, but she impatiently brushed them away. It felt like her life, Ben’s life, had been nothing but grief.

Artoo hummed at her and she smiled at him. “Time for rations, I think, then a bit of exploration around this rock, some meditation and then bed I think.”

Artoo beeped emphatically, disliking the meditation but informing her that he knew everything about Obi-Wan’s house.

Rey laughed a watery laugh. “Good,” she told him. “I have no doubt that you do.”

***

She dreamed that night.

A sandstorm struck as the suns set below the horizon.

R2 powered down and Rey tried to sleep on the hard pallet in Obi-Wan’s sleeping chamber, but the wind howled and cried and screamed at her, a maelstrom of sand. It was certain death for anyone caught outside unprepared.

And over the wailing of the wind, Rey was certain she heard a small voice crying.

“Please,” the little voice called piteously. “Please.”

Rey tried to reach out to him; she strained with every fiber of her being, but no matter how much she plead and pleaded and ordered the Force to show her Ben, she couldn’t reach him.

He was crying now, scared and alone, and Rey was crying too. Shoving her hands over her ears, she tried to block him out, unable to help him, unable to listen to his crying without wanting to do something, anything.

“Please,” she begged the Force, in echo to him. “Please,” she begged Kenobi’s ghost. Or Luke’s. Or Leia’s. Or whoever was listening. She reached over and held onto Ahsoka Tano’s padawan beads, using a simple Jedi mantra to try and calm herself, hoping against hope that child ghost-Ben could somehow feel her and would calm as well.

Yet when he finally fell silent, it was even worse

_Be with me_ , she chanted, _be with me_. Please don't leave me.

But he was gone, and Rey was alone again.

She must have dozed somewhere in the midst of the storm, because she dreamed of a woman she’d never seen in life.

The headtails and the face markings were the same, and her centered presence in the Force was a fulcrum at the heart of the storm.

Ahsoka Tano, robed in white and clothed in Jedi armor, was meditating in a place without windows, doors or walls. The dark of space and distant stars and circular doorways surrounded her. She opened her eyes and saw Rey.

She smiled. “Come find me,” she said.

And Rey woke up.

***


	2. the valley of the winds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tatooine is a powerful testing ground for a new Jedi Knight.

the valley of the winds

***

Days passed. Endless, forgotten days for the Tatooine desert was unchanging.

Rey’s sleep was fractured, fitful and her exhaustion made those interchangeable days feel like a single, never-ending day where rest never came.

Instead, like some kind of avenging housekeeper, she cleaned. She found an old broom and swept Ben Kenobi’s house free of sand and cobwebs. She chased all the spiders out – hairy, desert spiders as big as your hand – and directed them to find homes in a cave and not a Jedi’s house. She used bolts of faded cloth to hang up over the open windows and block out most of the sun and dirt.

The vaporator had been stripped for parts and the house had been looted main times over. It had also probably been stayed in sporadically by those desperate enough and crazy enough to attempt to cross the Dune Sea.

They’d left random tools and durasteel parts and wires behind, useless to them perhaps, but for the scaveneger in Rey, they were treasure. Jakku taught a person not to waste anything. As she and Artoo worked on jerry rigging the vaporator, she wondered what Tatooine would teach her.

 _Not sleep_ , she thought wryly, as her hand slipped for the fourth time in as many minutes and she cut the back of her hand.

Cursing, she chucked the tool across the sand with all her might and, with a snarl, stomped off back into Kenobi’s house. It was early evening, the twin suns going down beneath the horizon, and was undoubtedly Rey’s favorite time of day on this dustball.

Washing her hands free of dirt and blood and thankful that Artoo hadn’t followed her back in for the moment, she dried the sweat off her face and, probably in vain, settled into the middle of the room to meditate. Facing the open doorway and the jaggedly austere landscape, admiring the riot of color across the evening sky, she took deep even breaths as she tried to settle herself.

It was harder than usual. It was always hard now that Ben was gone, to reach out that place where all the Jedi were.

But Rey was determined and persistent, and besides she was so tired, so beyond tired, that she seemed to hover in the Force, floating.

It might have been five minutes or an hour later when she opened her eyes again. Artoo was patiently waiting for her and the sky was dark. Brilliant, white stars blazed across the midnight sky. “Wow,” Rey said, for the stars were brighter here than even back on Jakku.

Artoo trundled after her as she went back outside. Going to the very edge of the cliff face on which Obi-Wan’s house had been built, she dangled her legs over the side and looked out at the darkened landscape, the buttes and mesas and rocky hills that led down and down until it reached the flat expanse of the Dune Sea.

“It’s amazing here,” she told Artoo. She could feel small eddies of life emerging from their hiding places in the rocks now that the heat of the day had passed. “Dangerous, but beautiful,” and the words sounded like an echo from the Force.

Artoo beeped a rude noise and Rey laughed.

“Yes, I’m sure it can be very boring,” she conceded, although somehow, she thought that both Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi had had the ability to find trouble wherever they went. She _knew_ Anakin Skywalker had.

“I wonder what Ben would make of this place.” Ben had seemed like Leia, more at home in the silver palaces, snow-capped mountains and clear blue rivers of New Alderaan than on a planet made of dust and heat.

She didn’t realize she said the words aloud until Artoo’s answer.

**He never seemed to notice what planet he was on.**

Rey frowned. “Too busy?” she asked, intrigued. It felt like she knew Ben more than anyone, for he was a part of her, he always had been.

But there were so many things she didn’t know about him, so many things she had hoped and yearned to find out. 

Artoo said he didn’t know. Ben had been a quiet child, one who enjoyed ancient books and Alderaanian fairytales instead of playing outside with other children.

 **He wasn’t allowed to** , Artoo told her. **Leia worried about assassins and former Imperials and besides, he was a prince.**

“Always apart,” Rey murmured. By situation but also by inclination; much like her.

On her way back inside, Rey stumbled over something in the dark. Swearing slightly, she bent down and picked up a wind-smooth rock of indeterminate age. It felt warm in the Force and as her fingers closed around it, she felt a slight tug by her bellybutton. Rey’s psychometry, or maybe Ben’s passed on to her through their link, heard distant voices.

 _What is this place?_ A woman’s silvery voice, filled with awe. Ahsoka Tano’s.

 _They call it the Valley of the Winds._ This voice was masculine, a lilting coreworld accent now roughed by years under the Tatooine suns. Even Rey, who’d never met him, could hear the hint of authority in Obi-Wan Kenobi’s voice.

 _Why?_ Ahsoka asked.

 _Listen,_ Ben Kenobi said. _This is a place of memory._

And then their voices fell silent and the memory faded.

It took Rey a fortnight to find her way to the Valley of the Winds. She’d had to go back into the Oasis, the only town between her and Mos Eisley to speak with some of the locals.

They hadn’t liked the look of her, or her own coreworld accent – courtesy of her mother and father – but her last name, Ben’s family name, Skywalker, had relaxed them somewhat.

“Skywalker is a common name in the Outer Rim,” an ancient Sullustan with sunbeaten skin informed her.

“Used to be a couple of Skywalkers out by the Lars homestead,” said a wrinkled old human woman. “One of ‘em went off to be a navigator on a spice freighter. You related to one of them?” Her dark eyes were as piercing and assessing as Leia’s.

“I – I married one of them,” Rey said, the easiest explanation. Daughter of a clone of a Sith Emperor who fell in love with a Skywalker and was trained in the Force by his family was too much of a mouthful.

The locals shrugged, seeming to accept this.

“Spooky place, that,” said an attractive, middle-aged Twi’lek woman. “All the way out beyond the Dune Sea.”

“Place for the dead,” snapped an ornery old man with whiskers the size of Rey’s hand. “No call to be messing with the dead.”

Rey’s heart jumped strangely at those words. Death seemed all around her lately. _There is no Death, only the Force_ , she wanted to tell the man, but instead she just took a deep breath and patiently asked for directions.

***

The Valley of the Winds was a series of towering rock edifices that looked like thin, twisting spiral turrets on a castle. Weathered into strange shapes over millennia of wind erosion, many of the rock turrets, slender and delicate looking against a pale blue sky, were filled with holes.

As the wind whistled through the holes – large and small, straight through and even many with an apparently twisting shape like conch shells – they emitted sound. An unearthly hum and vibration filled the valley.

It was the most haunting, ethereal place Rey had seen, and it was filled with the Force in a way she hadn’t felt since Ach-To.

The sun burned hot on the back of her neck and sweat trickled down the back of her neck from the twin suns high above. Rey wandered through the stone spires, running her hands on the smooth, twisting surface and listening to the unearthly wailing of the wind.

She could feel the currents in this place, eddies rippling and bending spacetime like the giant tree above the fish nuns’ village. Or the mirror beside the dark pool beneath the village.

Ben, always a shadow at the corner of her mind, felt close here; as though she could reach behind her and he would reach back. She gnawed on her lip and tried to calm the racing of her heart and breath.

 _Be with me_ , Rey asked the Force; begged, pleaded. Just as she had a hundred times before.

And then she waited. She’d always been good at waiting. Settling down in the shadow of one of the slender spires, right at the center of the valley, Rey closed her eyes and reached out to the Force.

When she opened them, dusk was upon the valley and she was lying on sand looking up at softly twinkling starlight and clouds of swirling dust. The Force felt full and bright. And someone was lying next to her.

“We’re a dyad in the Force, Rey. I’ll always be with you.” Ben’s deep, familiar voice, like the reverberations of the earth, like the hum of Tatooine’s winds through the valley.

Rey held her breath and turned her head, not quite daring to hope.

Ben was smiling slightly, long, lean body stretched out beside her. As real as she was. She couldn’t look away from his face.

Turning on her side and lifting her head onto her hand, she greedily traced his pale skin, the scattered beauty marks and the uneven features. He was imperfect, as all the most beautiful things always are, yet Rey could still find traces of Leia’s legendary beauty in his features. He had Han’s nose though, and Anakin Skywalker’s riotous curls.

And Ben Kenobi’s ability to keep going even when all was lost.

“How is this possible?” She asked, her voice sounding utterly stunned.

Ben’s dark eyes were fathomless, the last of the sunshine bathing him in both light and shadow. “This is a place of memory,” he told her.

Rey’s heart, pounding frantically a moment before, fell to the pit of her stomach. He was only an echo, a memory. He wasn’t real.

She closed her eyes, not wanting even an echo of Ben to see her tears. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was strange, though, how she could feel him so clearly in the Force, that unique fiery signature of his.

“Look,” Ben said, a command. He nudged her with his elbow, centering her back in her own body. “Look at the stars.”

Sighing, but deciding to humor him, Rey flopped onto her back. The ground was hard and rocky here, the winds too strong for soft, sandy dunes to form. She squinted up through the swirling patterns of dust. The sky was violet and indigo and navy blue now, and the first stars were appearing one by one. She watched them appear and disappear behind the dust, almost as if they were winking at her.

She frowned. _How odd._

She watched them for a moment longer, straining to see the pattern. There had to be a pattern somewhere. The dust swirled in unpredictable movements, buoyed by eddies as the wind spun and whirled around the smooth, spiraling rock formations. When the dust thinned for a moment, the stars would appear. Yet the pattern continued to elude her. It was interesting, but chaotic, she decided, feeling her attention start to wander back to Ben at her side.

He was so warm, so real. As if he was alive just…somewhere else.

 _Just breathe_ , Ben’s voice came from inside her head. He sounded half-amused, half-exasperated. He flicked the back of her hand.

Rey made a face at him but tried to concentrate on her breathing. In, out, in, out. _Slower_ , she thought, and tried counting between the breaths.

The wind and the sand danced above her, but Rey was concentrating on her breathing and couldn’t hear them at all now.

 _Just breathe_ , Ben said again, and then his hand was slipping into hers, their fingers entwining, warmth and belonging and _home_ surrounding her.

And Rey, concentrating only on the feel of his rough, warm skin against hers, felt everything else drop away and she finally heard it.

Music.

Stunned, she jerked her head back up to the stars. The wind and the dust still moved and swirled and parted to let the heavens through, but now Rey heard the wind and not just saw it. It whistled and groaned and chattered and hummed as it danced around and through the swirling stone edifices. The holes and the angles and the changes in the winds path created an unearthly sound, like Tatooine itself was singing.

Or maybe the stars were, because even as Rey watched.

 _What is it?_ Rey asked, too awed to get the words out.

“It’s the music of the spheres,” Ben murmured aloud, sounding both surprised and delighted.

The expression echoed strangely in Rey’s mind, like a dream of a dream she’d had. She thought for a moment, the connection just in front of her. One of the many translations in the Jedi texts she’d read but not understood.

“Circles within circles, spheres within spheres….”

“—their music was believed by the ancients to be shown in the mathematical precision of the universe,” Ben continued for her. “It was the Whills who first heard—”

“—the music of the spheres,” Rey breathed. _A scholar and a poet_ , she thought sadly, watching Ben’s face and not the stars as his eyes darted about to take in the star-song. _He must have been both before everything happened._ She’d always been more mechanically inclined on Jakku, and there hadn’t been anything to read anyway, but she’d poured over books and historical records during her apprenticeship under Leia.

 _Go back to the beginning_ , the Princess turned General had said and Rey agreed, though she also found the ideas of successive Jedi scholars fascinating in their own right.

She thought again of those neat notes in the Jedi texts – Ben’s notes – taken during his travels with Luke Skywalker.

Rey felt the sting behind her eyes again and quickly looked away from him. Back up at the stars. “Obi-Wan Kenobi must have loved this place,” she said at last. She didn’t know how Ben felt about being named after the famous Jedi Master, but she had a special fondness for Kenobi as he’d been the first to reach out to her in the Force.

She knew he’d talk to Leia at times as well.

Ben didn’t tense at her side like she’d expected. He sounded more thoughtful than anything else when he said, “From what Uncle Luke told me, Obi-Wan enjoyed the Force’s curiosities.”

Rey snorted. “He must have.” She brushed her thumb over the back of Ben’s hand, trying to memorize every ridge, every hollow. “He’s watched over three generations of Skywalkers.”

Ben grunted low in his throat, still more interested in the pattern and music of the stars. Rey bit her lip and held her breath as she continued tracing his hand. Her heart was pounding hard with fear and hope and the knowledge that this was bound to end all too soon. The Force never gave her anything for long.

“I’m not sure you technically count,” Ben told her absently.

“Hey!” Rey said, slightly offended before she realized he was teasing her. Those dark eyes turned to look at her at last and he gave her a lopsided grin. She scowled at him, ignoring the little flutter in her stomach. It wouldn’t do to let him know she found that tiny little smirk charming.

For the first time she began to realize how Leia Organa, Princess of Alderaan, had been won by a Corellian smuggler of no birth or honorable profession. _Solo men_ , she thought, mentally shaking her head.

“Besides, I meant you,” she returned hastily. It was strange, overwhelming even, to be looked at like she was something infinitely precious. His dark eyes roamed her face and Rey swallowed heavily, telling herself she was being silly but still looking away, out over the darkening landscape, when it grew too much.

“Obi-Wan Kenobi never spoke to me,” Ben told her, voice too even to entirely mask the distant swell of bitterness she could feel in the Force.

Her hand tightened on his, her automatic reaction to comfort this man rearing its head again. It was followed by the urge she usually felt to stab him with something. He was difficult; he was a difficult, difficult man. His barriers were raised higher than even her own. Perhaps even dead he was having difficulty overcoming them.

Kylo Ren had driven her mad with rage just as often as he’d pushed her, challenged her, completed her, made her soul sing with belonging - - _Ben_ , she admitted ruefully. He’d let her see him when he’d allowed no one else too. Perhaps he’d had no choice. Often it had felt like Kylo Ren had known her better than she’d known herself after all.

She firmly squashed the urge to tell him not to be a baby about things. Someone who’d spent their life with Snoke in their brain wasn’t going to have the most rational, grown-up responses to what felt like abandonment by family members.

She blamed her grandfather for this mess.

“Yes, well,” she said, around a scratchy throat, aiming for lightness and knowing she had missed by about a mile. “That’s why he sent you me. The Force – and Master Obi-Wan – wasn’t going to let my grandfather win.”

Ben pulled his hand from hers anyway. He turned to look back up at the stars with a frown on his face, seeming to want distance. She could feel the growing storm of his emotions through their bond, and he had undoubtedly felt her own brief annoyance with him. The resulting patience might have stung just as much.

Rey chewed on her lip and thought about the best course of action. She wasn’t great at relationships – she’d always been a loner and even her relationships with Finn and Poe were complicated and uneven and messy. Poe annoyed her most of the time and Finn, Finn was far too clingy. She felt stifled by his affection as often as she felt grateful for his friendship.

Finn would follow her anywhere, she knew that, but that was part of the problem. He saw her as a hero - - when she really, really wasn’t.

But Ben was her other half. Without him it felt like half her soul was missing. He was her equal in every way, and she was his. He wasn’t allowed to pull away from her, even if all he was was a memory.

She turned onto her side and reached for him. He let her stroke her fingers into his soft hair, remaining completely pliant as she gently tugged until he rolled over to look at her. He raised his eyebrows. His dark eyes were a thunderstorm and an argument waiting to happen.

He felt abandoned and betrayed and lost, only good for the legacy he was meant to uphold. She’d not understood this until she too began to feel the weight of the Skywalker legacy on her own shoulders. His dark eyes smoldered, and he opened his mouth, no doubt preparing for a fight because he thought she was about to tell him off.

“You annoy me,” she told him severely, and then she kissed him. Hard.

It was as desperate as their first one, Rey shaking as she held onto him with all her strength. When he rolled over, his big body covering hers and sheltering her from the winds, she spread her thighs and wrapped her legs around him. One of his big hands cradled the back of her head and the other skated up her back until he could angle her a bit and deepen the kiss.

He was trying to gentle it, nuzzling her but Rey was having none of it. _You’re mine_ , she thought wildly, that old scavenger mentality of hers rising up. If you didn’t stake your claim to something on Jakku and fight tooth and nail to keep it, it was stolen away from you.

Well no one was stealing Ben from her. Not even the Force.

 _Mine_. She nipped his lips with her teeth, tasting the copper tang of blood on her tongue and she felt his start of surprise. Her hands were fisted in his hair, tilting him to where she wanted him, and she refused to let him break the kiss.

Not that he seemed to want to.

 _Mine_ , she thought again, desperate and afraid and angry as no Jedi should be.

 _Yours_ , Ben told her, a whisper in the Force. She whimpered as the reverberations came through their Force Bond, like vibrations, like music.

She pulled back from the kiss, panting and dizzy from lack of oxygen, lips stinging.

She stared up into coal black eyes that burned too hot, and kiss-swollen lips, and the way his silky hair hung down about his face. Force, she loved him. She hadn’t recognized it as love until she’d kissed him on Exogol, their relationship characterized by burning need and desire and rightness so often overpowered by uncertainty and anger and fear and desperation.

But she knew it now. Arching up, she claimed his lips again, pulling him back down on top of her and not letting him go for a long, long time.

***

Afterwards they lay side by side on the sands of Tatooine and watched the stars move across the heavens. Rey’s head was on Ben’s shoulder and she could feel the rise and fall of his even breaths.

She had a feeling that when the sun rose, he would be gone. A dream and a memory in this place where the Force seemed to converge.

Rey realized she was crying; slow tears, the kind that were wrenched out of you after years of pain and loss and were now impossible to stop whenever you grew sad. “I don’t want to leave,” she whispered, so low that she half-hoped Ben wouldn’t hear.

 _He’s only a dream, a memory_ , she told herself, but it was hard to remember that when his big hand felt so warm in hers.

“And yet you will.” His voice didn’t hold any sadness. It was merely a statement of fact.

There was silence between them for a while, as Rey thought and listened to the winds and felt Ben beside her, where he was meant to be.

“Did you and Master Luke ever find Ahsoka Tano?” she asked at last. 

She was gathered into his arms. He was so big that she felt like a doll as he cradled her but the awe with which he traced her features over and over again made her want to protect him from the world. That little boy she heard whenever she slept, crying from all the voices in his head and too afraid to tell anyone.

“Uncle Luke and I looked for her, and Mother sent out messages and agents, but none of them found her and her trail went cold after she vanished into the Unknown Regions.”

Rey shifted in his arms until she could feel his stubble against her chin. Distractedly she wondered if ghosts shaved.

“Do you think she’s still alive?” she asked. _Is she with you?_ She didn’t say.

Ben’s smile was annoyingly smug and distracting as he looked down at her. _Wouldn’t you like to know?_ It seemed to say. She thought about dragging him down for another kiss but knew that if she did, she would never be able to let him go again.

Reluctantly she extracted herself from his arms. He let her go without protest though his dark eyes watched her with alarming intensity. 

“Well I’m going to find out,” she told him.

The suns were slowing rising above the horizon, the shadows of the night chased away in the red-gold glow of Tatooine’s closest stars. Rey watched the sun flicker over Ben’s features. Already he looked insubstantial, a ghostly sheen to his features that looking nothing like the Force Ghosts of Master Skywalker and her Master Leia.

 _Where will you go?_ His voice echoed only in her mind now and she knew if she reached out to touch him, her hand would pass right through his form like mist.

She closed her eyes, not strong enough to watch him leaver he once more.

“Ach-To,” she told the empty air.

When sunlight touched the back of her neck, she opened her eyes.

Ben was gone.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rey journeys to the Dark Side cave on Ach-To.


	3. the place between the worlds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey attempts to find Ahsoka Tano, but the path of a Jedi is never simple, and the true test of the Force happens unexpectedly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rey & Rose on Zeffo (which I find such a beautiful place in Jedi: Fallen Order) where she finds a Force memory of Cal Kestis, Rey finds Ben in the Tomb of the Sages or he finds her, and Rey undergoes a trial by the Force where meets the lost Jedi, Ahsoka Tano in the place between the worlds. There she is given a choice.

the place between the worlds

***

When Rey returned to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s house, Artoo was waiting for her with a message from Rose.

“Rey!” the other woman’s excited face and voice came clear through the blue, holographic image the astromech droid projected. “I found something really exciting on Zeffo – I’m on Zeffo now, did I tell you that? Poe sent me here a week ago – anyway…. I found something _quite significant_. Come as soon as you can. I’m sending you coordinates through Artoo here.

“Say hi to Chewie for me!”

And she flickered back out of existence.

Rey knelt on the hard sand of Kenobi’s hut and listened to the wind and the ever-shifting sands of Tatooine. The curtains fluttered in the breeze and sunlight came through in bright shafts of light. The rippling curtains caused a dappling pattern across the floor and Rey watched the pay of light while she thought.

“What do you think, Artoo?” she asked at last.

“Beep, beep,” said the blue and white astromech. There wasn’t any hesitation in his voice and Rey smiled.

“I’m sure you’ve wanted to go after Ahsoka for years,” Rey opined, once more glancing around the sparse room. She wondered how Obi-Wan had spent his time here over the years. It must have been lonely, even worse than Jakku for Rey had never known friends and family before she’d met Finn and Han, Leia and Ben and BB-8 and the Resistance. Obi-Wan had grown up surrounded by Jedi, by family, and then had had that taken brutally away from him.

By the person he loved most.

She moved over to a weathered wooden table that was too derelict and uneven for anyone to want to steal. There was something in the clean lines of the wood that made Rey sure this had been here when Obi-Wan was.

Wood was a living thing in the Force. Gently she placed her hands on the rough, grey panels and closed her eyes. There.

The Force vision was like smoke. A distinguished looking man, tired, with greying auburn hair stood at the table next to Rey. His attention was fixed on a small model x-wing he was painstakingly whittling out of a piece of wood. A child’s toy.

 _It was for Master Skywalker_ , Rey thought, struck by the sight of the lonely man growing old far out in the desert, one of the last survivors of a genocide that destroyed his people. His only hope was a small child who didn’t even know his name.

The vision faded.

Rey focused on the grains of wood, running her fingers over the rough, sandblasted surface. “Artoo?” she asked, when she was sure her voice was steady. The droid twittered. “Do you miss Ben?” she asked.

She wasn’t sure whether she mean Ben Solo or Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The little droid’s forlorn whistle and his twitter of **I miss them both** , decided her path.

*

Zeffo was an oceanic world far out in the Outer Rim. Republic records showed that it had once been home to a force sensitive species of people who left behind great temples and curiosities but by the time of the Clone Wars they had long since disappeared. The pioneers and archaeologists who lived among the ruins when the Republic fell had been displaced by the Empire and the place was abandoned nearly a decade before the Battle of Yavin.

As Rey entered the atmosphere, she flew low to skim the blue-grey water, heading towards the coordinates Rose had given. Yet the closer the Millennium Falcon came to the small, rundown settlement the stronger a vague feeling of unease grew in her gut.

She felt restless and her heart was racking. “Chewie, slow down,” she told him, pulling back on the main thrusters. “Artoo, scan for lifeforms.”

Even before R2 and BB-8 began beeping at her, she could see the thin trail of smoke rising upwards on the horizon.

“Shields up,” she said, in a glacially calm voice she didn’t recognize as her own. The longer she trained as a Jedi, the more she found herself able to keep her head in a crisis. It was a trait she’d always admired in Master Organa. 

Chewie roared.

“Yes,” Rey agreed. “The First Order is here.”

The Falcon came up fast. A half dozen TIEs were arching high up over the metal and stone village, before coming down fast to strafe the running figures of scientists and colonists Rey could see from the cockpit’s viewport.

She unclipped her lightsaber, feeling its familiar and comforting weight like a lodestone in her palm.

“Go down low over the village and then go after those TIEs,” she told Chewie, who didn’t bother to argue with her. She turned and ran for the main hatch.

The Wookie swooped down low, firing at two of the TIEs in the middle of their strafing run. He hit one of them, sending it veering off course to crash into a building, exploding in a shower of red and orange flames.

Rey lowered the ramp, felt the wind whipping past her fast enough to make it impossible to breathe. She reached deep inside and centered herself in the Force, and then jumped.

She hit the ground – snow and rocks and thick, green grass – rolled and came up in a fighting crouch, yellow lightsaber already ignited. Time seemed to be moving slower than usual. She saw Rose and two or three others she recognized from the Resistance – the reformed Republic – firing from above as they covered people fleeing towards a towering stone edifice.

It had been built right into the side of a rockface and it towered over the small village. Two tall hooded figures were carved on either side, their right hands outstretched in a gesture to push or halt intruders. The figures did not look human and despite the fact that Rey knew there were not Jedi, the kind of reminded her of Master Skywalker with his voluminous robe.

A woman screamed and Rey looked around her again. A First Order stormtrooper, his or her white armor much tarnished from use and the fact that Poe and the Republic navy had the remnants of the Emperor’s forces on the run, was attempting to corner an older woman carrying a small child.

“Hey!” Rey yelled, running. “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

She didn’t wait for a response. Instead, she attacked.

Killing was not the Jedi way, she knew that, and she was honestly trying to work on her anger, but she drove her lightsaber through that ‘trooper without a second’s hesitation before she turned and attacked the others. Very quickly she turned a slaughter into a chaotic rout. First Order troopers were well-trained, but they were no match for a full Jedi Knight; certainly not after they’d been on the run for weeks, even months.

She could hear Chewie and the Falcon duking it out with the TIEs overhead.

“Rey!” Rose called from above. “Come on!”

She looked around to see another contingent of stormtroopers pouring into the narrow, grass-covered road between the buildings. Why were they even here? She wondered, as she took a running leaping and landed on top of the nearest building.

She began to run on top of the buildings, calling on the Force and clearing them easily as she caught up with Rose and the fleeing people.

Rose was covered in carbon dust and one or two bruises, but her eyes were bright with happiness when Rey reached her. “Glad you could make it!” she joked, whipping her sweaty face with a sleeve.

“Who are these barves?” Rey asked, guarding the rear and deflecting blaster fire as the last of the fleeing people reached the relative safety of the Zeffo tomb.

Rose ducked a blaster bolt and returned fire, timing her shots between Rey’s lightsaber swings. “You know as much as I do!” she shouted over the noise.

Chewie swooped down and fired at the troopers, scattering them for the moment.

“They showed up barely 30 minutes before you did. Out of nowhere! We had no warning!” Rose continued. Her voice echoed as she and Rey stepped back into the tomb. The ever-present Zeffo wind lessened a bit and from farther into the tomb Rey could hear the echoes of people trying to calm frightened children and taking stock of their weapons.

“What do they want?” Rey asked, deflecting another blaster bolt back towards its source and killing the man instantly. She could feel his death in the Force. This place was heavy with death now.

The way behind them was littered with fallen bodies, settler and stormtrooper alike.

“I don’t know,” Rose said, quieter now. “What do they always want? To take what isn’t theirs.”

She and Rey were still retreating, guarding each other’s backs. They didn’t have to speak to one another to continue their slow retreat. The more they narrowed the area by going into the tomb, the less troopers they had to face at once. Hopefully they could thin them out enough that by the time they were ready to mount a counteroffensive, they stood a chance.

“Where’s Dil and Bryce?” Rey asked after a moment, when a brief lull in the blaster fire enabled her to switch her lightsaber off and duck behind a nearby boulder. The tomb was old and crumbing in places. It was also pitch black and without the leading glow of her lightsaber, she hoped the troopers would be thrown off for a couple of seconds.

“Dil’s dead. I think,” Rose hissed back. She was squinting at her blaster in the darkness, trying to read how many rounds she had left before she had to replace the carbon from the display panel. “Bryce is organizing the defense.” She wrinkled her nose. Rey could feel it more than see it in the darkness, despite how close they were to one another. “What defense we can mount, anyway.”

“Looks like it’s just you and me, then,” Rey told her. Her left hand was slippery on the hilt of her lightsaber and she was doing the deep breathing Master Organa had showed her.

Rose’s grin was a feral as Rey’s, a brief movement in the darkness. “Just like old times,” the other woman said. They clasped hands for a moment.

Again, they didn’t need to talk. They’d done this move before. Rey would slip behind the troopers in the darkness. After ten seconds, Rose would open fire from the front and Rey would attack from the rear. They’d get the troopers in a simple pincer movement.

 _Classic_ , Rey thought. She moved silently but surely through the darkness, senses stretched out and magnified through the Force.

“You hear that?” asked one of the troopers. They had their night vision scopes turned on in their helmets.

“That was nothing,” said another. “They’re all hiding up ahead.”

“Well, where’s that Jedi then?”

“Do you see a Jedi anywhere around here, CT-45161?” snapped a third.

 _Your eyes can deceive you_ , Master Organa voice said from Rey’s memory. _Don’t trust them_. The Princess had smiled then, her silvering hair catching the sunlight on Ajon Kloss. _My brother taught me that and General Obi-Wan Kenobi taught_ him _that_. _You are part of a long, though somewhat fractured, line of Jedi. Never forget that, Rey. We have all been where you are now._

Rey tried to remember that as she moved through the darkness. There were days when Leia’s absence gnawed at her like the constant hunger she’d felt on Jakku.

She stumbled over something she hadn’t sensed in the dark, biting her lip to keep from crying out. Her boot made a dull ‘clunk’ – metallic – but luckily it wasn’t audible over the shuffling of First Order boots and the dripping water off the stone walls.

A faint ‘zing’ went up Rey’s spine. Holding her breath, she crouched down and reached out with her right hand. Her fingers brushed something cold and broken into pieces. The jagged edges were sharp.

Her stomach fell out from under her like she’d suddenly been dropped from a great height and she found herself in the hold of a ship, green plants growing under glowlights, as three people and a droid stood around a Jedi holocron.

A young man with a scarred face, red hair and kind blue eyes said: _Their destiny should be trusted to the Force_.

The vision faded and Rey found herself back in the tomb on Zeffo, stomach roiling and eyes covered in spots as she tried to re-accustom them to darkness.

“The Force,” she whispered. She could feel it, moving in powerful currents through the tomb. She stood up again, head spinning. That had been a powerful Force vision, magnified by the Zeffo.

From far too close, Rose opened fire.

 _No_ , Rey had time to think. She wasn’t in position yet. But there was no help for it. As Rose lay down suppressing fire, Rey drew Han’s blaster in one hand and her lightsaber in the other and attacked.

She knew after only a minute, that she’d made a mistake somehow. Instead of being behind the stormtroopers, her delay with the holocron meant that she was now right in the middle of an entire platoon. She was still dizzy from the Force currents in this place and she and Rose had underestimated the First Order’s strength. Or perhaps more stormtroopers had come.

Whatever the case, Rey duck and spun and deflected fire and cleaved through weapons and armor, but she knew it was only a matter of time before –

One of them got through her defenses and kicked her legs out from under her. Hard. Her lightsaber went flying, the tomb descended into darkness and Rey hit her head painfully on the stone floor. Rose’s cry of “Rey!” echoed in her ears.

She released a panicked breath, feeling trapped and overwhelmed, the Force escaping from her control as she tried to call upon it. _No_ , she thought, afraid that if she fell here, Rose and others would be slaughtered.

She could see the stormtrooper who’d knocked her down pointing his blaster at her, his finger depressing the trigger. _Please_ , she thought….

And then the most marvelous thing happened.

Rey’s lightsaber was ignited, a golden glow bathing both the stormtrooper and Rey in light, as the figure of a man came from the darkness and ran the trooper through from behind.

The man’s dark hair flowed out in a halo and Rey caught a brief glimpse of pale skin and a decided nose but the man didn’t hesitate. Rey’s lightsaber held loosely in one hand, he moved in a continuous arc as the ‘troopers opened fire and he deflected, spun, attacked and defended all at once. Two more fell to the ground in a single second. A third one was decapitated. A fourth one lost a limb.

And then he dropped Rey’s lightsaber and as the glow faded Rey saw him bend forward, slamming his hands together hard in a clap, a powerful Force push dispersing the two-dozen remaining ‘troopers hard into the walls of the tomb surrounding them. He’d stunned them for a brief moment.

“Rey, get up!”

His voice. Ben’s voice.

Rey crawled, grabbed her lightsaber and found her feet again.

 _Breathe, just breathe_ , Master Skywalker told her, the sun on Ahch-To warm on her face, the porgs calling in the distance and the sound of the sea lapping the rocks constant in her ears.

“I can do this,” she said, finding the calm within herself again. Ben was still here, with her. Somewhere. Somehow.

She was not alone.

*

Afterwards, she could feel Rose’s eyes upon her. The injured were tended to and those among the First Order who finally surrendered were locked up in a makeshift jail rigged together in the village. The remaining settlers and scientists decided to stay inside the Zeffo tomb for the moment.

Rose and Chewie were across the main room of the tomb, on a call with Poe. Rey could hear Poe’s quick, sharp voice as he demanded details and assessed the damage. Poe Dameron had unsurprisingly turned into a great General, and in the wake of Leia’s death Rey sometimes thought he was the only thing holding the remnants of the Republic together.

Their voices dropped.

“How’s she doing?” she heard Poe ask.

Rose’s reply was inaudible.

Rey sighed and closed her eyes. She was seated cross legged in a secluded corner of the main room. Her pants were slowly dampening from the wet stone underneath, but the material was durable, and she wasn’t worried about stains to the white cloth. Her face was grimy with sweat and tendrils of hair escaped her neat buns, but she wasn’t worried about that either. Instead, she held one of the broken pieces from the holocron in her hand and stretched out to touch the Force.

She could hear the excited chatter from children of half a dozen different species, she heard Poe’s strident tones as he gave orders to someone out of sight of subspace comm. Luckily Poe and several ships from the New Republic fleet were only a couple systems away.

“We’ll be there in 1.5 standard hours,” General Dameron said, and the comm was disconnected.

Chewie muttered something and Rey could feel Rose’s amusement in the Force. “Yes, he certainly is acting like a General,” the senior engineer of the New Republic’s fledging fleet said. She sighed. “And now he’ll probably order us off this rock just when things were getting interesting.”

Chewie groaned.

Artoo, who’d rolled up to Rey’s side, beeped softly.

“Yes, he’ll probably bring Threepio with him,” Rey murmured back, trying to stay in the moment. The steady dripping of the water off moss-covered walls was a great help in focusing on the Force.

She breathed in the cool, clean air of Zeffo. She felt the play of light and darkness on her skin as the clouds high above and the narrow windows in the tomb alternated in hiding the sun. Zeffo was a single star system, as a majority of other habitable worlds also were. Yavin IV, where Luke founded his Jedi Academy, was an exception in that the habitable worlds of that system orbited a gas giant instead of a star.

Yavin IV had been one of the places linked in the chart she’d found in the ancient Jedi texts. Zeffo had been another. Exogol and Ach-To and Malachor and Lothal were still other worlds. Many she hadn’t recognized and the explanation the ancient Jedi put there – Chain Link Theory or the vergence scatter – had been no help at all.

Why were they linked? What did it mean?

Rey wasn’t a scholar; that was more Ben’s thing not hers. She sometimes wondered what he’d left behind on his First Order flagship and if they’d been destroyed in the wake of disappearance. Leia had said once that her son liked old books and fancy writing on actual pieces of paper, which Rey had learned was called calligraphy.

Sometimes she was ashamed at her lack of knowledge, but Leia had never shown impatience when Rey asked questions. “We’re all always learning,” her master said when Rey asked her about it. “That is the path of the Jedi.”

The shattered pieces of the holocron were warm now in Rey’s hand. She could hear whispers in the Force. She tried not to push, instead reigning in her impatience and waiting. She felt for the severed bonds she had with Leia and Ben.

 _You cannot save them._ A woman’s low, sultry voice. There was a darkness in her. A well of despair and anger and bitterness.

 _Their destiny should be trusted to the Force._ The same young man’s voice as before.

 _Every Jedi faces the dark side. And it’s very easy to fall. We will always struggle. But that is the test._ A different woman. Older. Sadder.

 _I guess it’s about time I find out who I am._ The boy who must be her Padawan.

 _…Trust in the Force._ And Master Obi-Wan’s voice of course.

The distant voices faded on Zeffo’s wind.

“Rey?”

She opened her eyes to find Rose sitting across from her. Her friend looked as grimy as Rey felt, but her eyes were bright with interest as she handed Rey a datapad. And then, to Rey’s astonishment, she held out a lightsaber as well.

Rey’s eyes widened.

“This is why I wanted you to come,” Rose confessed. “Well, this and what I found in the old Imperial records still stored here. I downloaded it to my datapad and cleaned it up a lot – it was hard to tell what was going on before – but it’s something I think you’ll want to see.”

Rey was turning the lightsaber over and over in her hands. It was an unfamiliar design, circular with the hilt inside it.

“I think it’s meant to rotate,” Rose confessed.

“Double-bladed, too,” Rey noted.

“Yes, but—”

“—the crystal’s been taken,” Rey finished for her, enjoying Rose’s brief expression of surprise melting into chagrin.

“How’d you know?” the other woman asked.

“I can feel it,” Rey confessed. “There was darkness and sadness attached to this weapon but….” she frowned, concentrating a bit on the Force’s currents. “The crystal was taken – to be used – in honorable purpose…”

She shrugged. “That’s all I can tell.”

“Taken by a Jedi?” Rose sounded excited, but Rey knew it was a long time ago now and the odds of the person who took the crystal still being alive were slim. It was even slimmer that Master Skywalker and Master Organa hadn’t found them.

“Maybe,” Rey said, her tone not encouraging but Rose seemed undeterred, all but bouncing in place as she gestured towards the datapad.

“Go ahead,” she prompted. As Rey flicked the switches to power the machine on, Rose continued: “It’s an old Imperial transmission sent from the outpost here to Coruscant. Coded High Priority and sent to something called the Inquisitorius.

The New Republic’s sole Jedi Knight grimaced. “They hunted Jedi and Force sensitives under the Empire,” Rey told her, finding the file in question and calling it up. “What few remained after the Clone Wars, anyway.”

The message scrolled across the datapad’s screen. Rose scooted around beside her to look at it again and even Artoo raised himself up to look at it over their shoulders.

In Aurebesh it read:

High Priority: Jedi fugitives Cal Kestis and Cere Junda have escaped Zeffo. Entered hyperspace at 0.892 by 34.9337. Likely destination: Unknown Regions.

Rey gave a low whistle. “You ever hear of either of them, R2?” Rey asked the little droid. Artoo’s memory banks were filled with information all the way back to 10 years before the Clone Wars and he had met many Jedi who’d fought in the wars during his time with Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. He’d also been with Bail Organa, Leia’s father, as the Alderaanian senator desperately tried to locate any Jedi who’d survived the Purge.

The little droid beeped a negative.

Rey bit her lip and thought. “Rose, you still have the coordinates to Exogol, right?”

The other woman nodded. “It’s tricky because it’s a series of jumps, not a straight path at all. And it’s constantly shifting so the course changes and the coordinates become obsolete. But you want me to compare the location of the first jump to where they might be going?”

Rey nodded.

“Why?” Rose was already calling up that data.

“Just a hunch.” _Trust in the Force._

 _I’m trying, Master_ , she thought.

Rose’s crow of triumph brought her back to the present. Rey reached over and grabbed it from her. “It’s the same?”

The two women squabbled good naturedly over the device before the both squeezed in to look at it together.

“It’s close enough by a factor of .05,” Rose confirmed. She paused. “What does that mean? Were they going to Exogol? And why? How’d they know how to get there?”

Rey stared down at the numbers on Rose’s datapad. She had no idea what it meant, what any of it meant, but the idea that two other Jedi had been here, had gone off into the Unknown Regions on a quest of their own long before Rey was even born, filled her with a strange sort of hope. _We are all on our own journey_ , she thought to herself.

“I have no idea, Rose,” Rey confessed. She stood up from the ground in sudden purpose. “But I think it’s time I find someone to ask.”

*

Ahch-To was as beautiful and green as she remembered it. With the Falcon powering down behind her, Rey walked through the fish nun’s village to a host of hostile stares. Waving at them in an abashed fashion – the last time she’d been here she’d burned a TIE silencer on their property after all – she hurriedly climbed the Jedi Steps up to their ancient gathering of simple dwellings.

Ben’s notes in one of Master Skywalker’s books came back to her. _The Jedi appeared to begin as a monastic order_ , he wrote in his elegant script. _Their early settlements were secluded and located on unknown or mostly uninhabited worlds. Contemplation of the Force?_ Below it, obviously added years later in Luke’s square handwriting came the words: **Confirmed on Ahch-To. First Jedi settlement. Inhabitants called them ‘sky walkers’. Translation possibly incorrect.**

Rey waited for Master Skywalker or Master Organa to appear for a fortnight. She practiced with her lightsaber and tried the forms Luke and Ben had been painstakingly creating and re-creating from lost knowledge acquired about the Order.

She read everything she could find on vergence scattering in the Jedi texts and the Falcon’s computer. She even managed to reach Republic historian Beaumont Kin, who had helped her decipher the Jedi texts, and asked him to research anything he could find on the topic.

Chewie, the porgs, BB-8 and R2 stayed on the falcon or helped out the fish nuns, but Rey remained in the Jedi huts. Waiting.

Sometimes it felt like she’d been waiting her entire life.

The day of the storm, she finally had enough. As wind and rain lashed the island, and darkness fell like a blanket hiding even the stars, Rey made her way down to the cave beneath the island and jumped into the water.

She could swim a bit better now for that had been one of the first things Leia made her learn, but the seas in the little inlet were rough and it was a frightening couple of minutes before she broke through the surface again and was able to suck in a lungful of air.

She scrambled up onto the stone ledge, drenched and shivering. The waters of the inlet surged and retreated again, crashing over the top of the stone ledge and lapping onto her boots. Above her, outside of the cave, the winds from the storm howled and beat against the stone, whipping down through the hole high above and frothing the water so that white caps appeared on the waves.

Rey was glad she’d left both her lightsaber and Han’s blaster back in the Jedi hut.

It was colder in the cave than it had been outside in the storm. Shivering, Rey turned and faced the mirror. _The only thing that’s in there is what I bring with me_ , she reminded herself firmly. 

There was no menace in the cave. It was dark, but a clear kind of darkness – waiting to be filled. Rey took a slow, deep breath, squared her shoulders and walked up to the obsidian glass. Not giving herself a moment to second guess, she reached out and touched the mirror with the fingertips of her left hand.

This time there was no endless line of Reys heading towards infinity. Instead it felt like Rey was standing in outer space. Above her the stars moved in graceful arcs and directly ahead was a line of asteroids, small and large, circling the rock she appeared to be on. In front of her, on the surface of the planetoid, were lines leading to glowing dots. The dots were surrounded by rings, like the orbits of planets, but they were connected to each other in strange lines and 90-degree angles as well. It looked like a map, although none Rey had ever encountered.

It looked a bit like the chain world theory from the ancient Jedi texts.

Everything was dark but light from an unknown star poured in from ahead and the orbits of the miniature stars and planets shown palest white and gold as well.

There was peace in this place and a strange music, or hum, as well. Coming from the miniature stars and planets, perhaps. Or from their motions in relation to one another. Like when she’d lain in the Valley of the Winds with Ben.

The connection between all things, Master Skywalker had called it. The Force.

“The music of the spheres,” she breathed, remembering Ben’s name for her. Her voice eched strangely in this place.

“Hello!” she called. The stars and planets took up her call. “Hello!” she tried again.

Not knowing quite what she was looking for, Rey stepped forward. Some instinct she couldn’t name had her following the white lines connecting the dots. Circles within circles, she realized as she moved forward slowly, but she stayed off of those as well. They seemed less sturdy, less certain, than the straight lines. When she reached a dot, the next line would appear. Certain dots had more than one line extending from it, often at 180-degrees to one another but each time she stepped on it only one of the lines would light up.

Each dot and line, the connection between the spheres and the sphere itself, hummed a different note in the Force. As Rey continued on her journey, the vibration from her path blended together into a sound she would never be able to describe properly afterwards.

It was a bit like a tinkling brook and a bit like birdsong on a spring day. It was the lazy hum of a late summer afternoon, and the ripple of sand across the desert. It was sunlight on snow and wind in the mountains. It was the rumble of the deep sea, where no sentient being had gone before.

Rey knew when she’d arrived at where she was supposed to be. Someone was waiting for her.

A tall woman in a gleaming white cloak was seated in a ring of circles. The starlight reflected off her orange skin and white facial markings and her two lightsabers were placed before her, the crystals aids to her meditation.

Rey sighed in relief. She knelt down in the center of her own ring of circles and placed her hands on her thighs. She was excited and scared and calm all at the same time. “Master,” she said, breaking the spell of silence which hung around them.

Ahsoka Tano opened her eyes and smiled when she saw Rey. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said simply. “The circle is now complete.”

Rey frowned. “Waiting for me? I’ve been trying to find you!”

Ahsoka’s blue eyes were wise and although she still looked young, Rey could see she’d lived much. “Why are you trying to find me?”

“I need your help to save Ben,” Rey told her, speaking the words aloud for the first time.

The Jedi frowned. “Leia’s son?” she asked.

Rey nodded. “We’re a dyad in the Force,” she explained. “Like in the prophecies, and –”

She broke off at Ahsoka’s wry smile. “Those damn prophecies,” she said, surprising Rey. “How Master Obi-Wan hated them and how smug Master Qui-Gon must be, wherever they are now.” Rey had no idea what the other Jedi was talking about but Ahsoka’s conspiratorial grin invited her to share in the irony. “Although I don’t think even Master Qui-Gon could have predicted any of what happened, prophecies or not.”

Rey shrugged. “Leia never liked them either.”

Ahsoka studied Rey carefully. “I can see them both in you, a little bit,” she confessed. “Your Masters. But you’re also something new; not bound to the past but…. with echoes of it.”

“That’s generous of you, Master Tano,” Rey confessed. “Most of the time I feel like so much has been lost that I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Yes,” Ahsoka agreed. “I can see how that would happen. You shouldn’t have to rebuild the framework of the Jedi Order from scratch again.” She reached out a hand as though to rest it on Rey’s shoulder but then appeared to think better of it. Rey watched it settle on her knee again, such a soft motion in a woman with a core of iron. “That is why you’re here, Rey Skywalker. It’s not for Ben Solo.”

Rey shook her head in mute denial. No.

Ahsoka smiled sadly. “My Jedi path led me away from everyone I loved. Anakin. Obi-Wan. Artoo. Rex. Leia and Luke…Ben.” There was a wealth of sadness in her eyes but no regret. “I had to trust in the Force to direct my path, despite how badly I wanted…other things.” Now she did reach out a hand to place it on Rey’s shoulder. Although her touch was warm and reassuring, a strange ‘zing’ ran up Rey’s spine, as though Ahsoka was far, far away from her in both time and space, despite the fact that she sat across from her.

“A similar choice lies before you,” Ahsoka continued. Her voice was so achingly understanding but inexorable at the same time. Rey could no more hide from her than she could hide from her own inner demons. “You can follow this path and find your Ben…but the Jedi will end with you. And so much will be lost.”

Her eyes were like blue diamonds as she stared into Rey’s own. “Or, you can follow my path. Find me. Find Jedi Knight Ezra Bridger. Find the Chiss sky walkers. Bring as many Force sensitives who wish to follow the Jedi path as you can. We need you Rey. And I think you might need us.” Ahsoka was already fading, her form turning insubstantial the longer she spoke. Her hand on Rey’s shoulder no longer held any weight.

Rey spoke through the pain in her chest. “How do I find you?” she asked, noting that Ahsoka did not say the names of Cal Kestis or Cere Junda. The Force had led them on a different path.

“We left from the Lothal system,” Ahsoka Tano said, her from fading so that only her voice remained. “From there we travelled to Batuu. Outside Black Spire Outpost there is a gravestone to a royal Naboo handmaiden. Her name was Duja and she was a friend of Padme Amidala. Your Ben’s grandmother. I’ve left our jump coordinates into Chiss space hidden in that place.

“From there you’re on your own. May the Force be with you, Rey Skywalker.”

And then she was gone.

Rey never knew how long she stayed there, in the space behind the cave, in the place between the worlds. She remembered wanting so badly to continue onwards, from dot to dot, sphere to sphere. The further she went between space and time, she knew that somewhere, somehow, she would find Ben again.

But she also knew that Ahsoka was right. If she continued on the path her heart begged her to, she would never return.

She was the last known Jedi. She couldn’t just disappear into nothing, leave the Republic Leia Organa had lived all her life for to flounder. The Republic, the galaxy, needed the Jedi and for now Rey would have to do.

At least until she could train a few more Jedi.

Besides her master, Princess Leia Organa, had faced more no-win situations than anyone Rey had ever encountered or read about in history. She’d reached out to Ben in the end, Rey had felt it. She'd done _something_ and Rey felt in her gut that it was something neither she, nor Palpatine, nor anyone else was expecting.

Except for maybe Maz Kanata.

Before Rey left for Lothal – but after she asked Finn and the Force sensitive prospective pupils whether they wanted to take up the Jedi path – she was going to have to have a long conversation with the millennia old pirate queen.

She needed all the help – and hope – she could get.

 _I’ll always be with you_ , she promised Ben, wherever he was. _But I can’t follow you. Not yet._

Mind made up and path laid before her, Rey turned back towards Ahch-To and trusted in the Force.

*

To Be Continued

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next story in this series takes place from Finn's POV, six years down the road. His Jedi Trial takes him to a place he never thought he'd gone, as he tries to help Rey fight an enemy from Beyond. 
> 
> P.S. Yuuzhan Vong, Ben and Finn meet, Ahsoka's and Thrawn's fates are revealed, and Finn finally gets to wield a lightsaber as a Jedi. Stay tuned!


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